If I were watching a newcaster in Kabul, I wouldn’t think it was big deal if they didn’t pronouce a US city exactly how we do. Why should I care the other way around?
It’s pronounced that way in American English. If you don’t speak Arabic, don’t speak Arabic.
Out of idle curiousity (I’m ill and bored), do you also say eye-talian?
Let’s try again. It’s not a matter of how people in Afghanistan pronounce it. They could say ‘Schwartz’ for all I care. Germans don’t say ‘Munich’, or even ‘Germany’, for that matter. But the convention for pronouncing the capital of Afghanistan in the English-speaking world is ‘cobble’, and has always been ‘cobble’, except for the uninformed or intentionally stupid among us. I would be just as annoyed with a newscaster who said BER-lin or MAD-rid.*
It’s a peeve, okay? If your job is to report international news, then perhaps you ought to have enough professional integrity to find out how to accurately read the script, even if you’re a geographical numbskull.
*Speaking of which, we had a local newscaster here years ago who insisted on saying ‘Loze Ang-galeez’ for Los Angeles. Drove me crazy.
No, but I don’t say “Italiano”, either.
I expect a little thing like accuracy and informativeness out of my newscasts. They get paid a lot of money, and presumably that reflects more than the ability to read a TelePrompTer.
It can be useful to actually know accurate information- for example, it’s all fun and games to say “Vienna”, but when I was an 18 years old backpacker trying to read a schedule in a foreign language, it would have been really nice to know that I wanted to the train to “Wien.” I had a few rather confused conversation with train station officials that night.
Sure, in some places it’s all pretty theoretical and it doesn’t matter if we call Afghanistan “Bob” and Iraq “Fred”. But it’s not to hard to run in to and Afghani or Iraqi here, and I’d really appreciate all the help I can get not looking like an ass around them. A news media and general culture that respects facts is nice in that regards.
No, it’s not. It’s mispronounced that way, by some, in American English. In this day and age, with constant availability of accurate information on such things, there’s no need to imperialize another country’s pronunciation out of simple ignorance. In 16th Century England, an English speaker in England was only likely to hear the name of a place like Milano or Torino via a game of global telephone; he was highly unlikely to hear it from the lips of an actual Italian. So the entrenchment of such pronunciations, based on local conventions, made perfect sense.
This is no longer the case. And though it’s not a new word, by any means, “Iraq” was not a common enough word in English parlance to have become as intractably entrenched by a traditional mispronunciation, like Vienna or Mexico.
Saying eye-RACK isn’t much different from saying nucular. Or, as pointed out above, eye-talian. Ignorance was excusable to a 16th cent. Englishman. You? Not so much.
All the members of the Axis of Evil are the same anyways. 
Different languages have different sounds. For some sounds, if you haven’t been exposed regularly to people speaking that language by the time you hit puberty, you might just be SOL. The parts of your brain that learn to recognize speech sounds stop developing at that point, and you may never actually hear certain new speech sounds correctly, much less be able to reproduce them in your own speech.
Given this, not to mention the huge number of different languages with different spelling rules, to expect anyone to be able to correctly pronounce names in every language in the world is silly, and personally I’d prefer that they not make fools of themselves trying. Most commonly used foreign words and phrases aquire a standard pronunciation that is not only pronouncable by speakers of our language, but also understandable to an audience who speaks our language.
My last name is German, containing uvular r’s and vowels that are pronounced one way in German and another in English. I pronounce it one way when I’m speaking German to other German-speakers, and another way when I’m speaking English to other English speakers. When I’m speaking English with a native English speaker, and they use (or more frequently, attempt) the German pronunciation, I usually just give them a funny look, because who the fuck are they trying to impress?
Dude. THis is ridiculous.
The sounds “ee” and “RAHK” are readily pronounceable in English. (My description of the trilled R was facetious, although personally I use a slightly crisper R than usual when saying Iraq and Iran.
Dude, THis is backed by research. (Please note that whilte the point of this particular cite is that adults can be trained to recognized new sounds to a greater degree than was once thought, notice that it required quite a bit a training for some rather small gains.)
And an Iraqi or Iranian would probably still think you were prounouncing it wrong because you’re getting the r wrong. Crisp or uncrisp, it’s not the same r sound used by Arabic or Farsi speakers. You can think that your pronunciation is superior to “eye-RAHK”, but if you think that the “correct” pronunciation is the one used by the people who live there, you’re still getting it wrong. Plus you’re chosing a pronunciation that’s non-standard among English speakers, so you’re going to be looked at askance by speakers of your own language.
When a mob of Afghanis gets really peeved, they throw Kabul stones.
What the FUCK are you going on about? It’s ridiculous because the sounds in “ee RAHK” are not outside of everyday normal English/American pronunciation. Not because your basic science is wrong, but because it has absolutely nothing to do with “eye RACK versus ee RAHK.” And no one is talking about fooling a native Iraqi. We’re just saying that “ee RAHK” is closer than “eye RACK.” That “ee RAHK” is an approximation, within the limits of America/English pronunciation, but “eye RACK” is flat out wrong.
“eye RACK” is insulting, like saying “eye TAL yun.” “ee RAHK” is at least minimally respectful.
Jeez, what a tool you are, if you think those arguments favor “eye RACK” over “ee RAHK.”
Well, it’s blatantly clear that what you’re on about is another ridiculously contrived and pretentious “pitting”, a circle-jerk the likes of which could only occurr on the SDMB.
Actual Arab speakers with an *actual * knowledge of the right way to pronounce these things (as opposed to your lovely little flourish with the “slightly crisper R than most”) are asking who the fuck cares.
Oh, and I am going to start saying nucular just to piss you off.
When real Afghanis or Iraqis actually get annoyed at us for mispronouncing the name of their nation ever so slightly, and when they can pronounce the name of the United States in perfect standard American English without accents, go ahead and bitch. Until then, and until hell freezes over, careful because you’ve got something on your leg.
We aren’t talking about individuals here. We are talking about the news media, which is supposed to be informative and…well…right about things. This is especially relevant to America, because we like to talk a lot about how important our press is to freedom and having an informed electorate. When our own press- which has a huge impact on voting decisions, can’t be bothered to try to find a reasonable pronunciation of things- it kind of sends a message, you know?
Who said anything about annoying anyone? Who said anything about “without accents”? ee RAHK is exactly as easy to say as eye RACK. What exactly is your agenda in saying it wrong?
Oh, bullshit, it’s not disrespectful. It is the common pronunciation for American English speakers because English speakers, who, I assume, were not conspiring to give the countries of Iran and Iraq horribly insulting misprounounced names, took their best hack at pronouncing it right, and that’s more or less what the majority settled on.
I don’t know any anti-Italian bigots, so I can’t speak to EYE-talian being used as an offensive slur (it just sounds kind of quaint and goofy to me), but I don’t think most people intend EYE-raq to be a slur.
I don’t take it as a personal insult if people mangle my last name, because they don’t mean it as a slight, they’re just dealing with an unfamiliar name. I’m certainly not insulted when people in other countries have quirky pronunciations for “United States”, “America,” “Washington, D.C.” or my fine home state of “Iowa.” (In fact, I think that the typical German pronunciation, EE-oh’-vah, is rather pretty.) And none of the foreign-born speakers I know get upset when Americans don’t pronounce the names of their countries, cities, politicians, and celebrities the same way that native speakers do.
I don’t believe I ever made the claim that eye-RAHK was easier to pronounce. The only thing it has in its favor, IMHO, is that it’s more broadly used.
I provided the cite because it seemed to me that you were questioning my assertion that adults have a hard time learning some new speech sounds.
It was part of the more general point that approximating the way that native speakers pronounce a word is not a particular virtue because most foreign speakers are going to have a hard time reproducing some sounds, anyway. I think that once a group has settled on a pronunciation of a foreign word, there’s not much to be gained by campaigning to try to get people to pronounce it differently, or demonizing those who use the pronunciation that you have decided is inferior to your own version. It seems awfully shallow to dicker over vowel sounds when there are much more crucial misunderstandings between our cultures that we could focus our energy on.
So if I consistently mispronounced your name, you’d be okay with it as long as I’d done it long enough? You wouldn’t eventually be like “Hey man, we’ve been hanging out together for years now, maybe it’s time you learned how to say my name” eventually?And you wouldn’t mind if I taught my kids and in fact everyone I know to say your name wrong?
Lissener, let me tell you where I’m coming from. I’m constantly surrounded by foreigners - largely English speakers - who insist on trying to pronounce words as we “natives” do and constantly fail. One of these days I’m going to snap, slap some unlucky soul in the face and say:
“Stop saying ‘Yerushalayim’! Your ‘R’ is wrong, your ‘L’ is wrong, your vowels are much too rounded. You may think your saying it ‘right’, but all you’re doing is being a pretentious, condescending ass. Plus, you sound like an idiot. Just say ‘Jerusalem’ and get it over it - at least THERE’S a word you can pronounce properly and save what’s left of your dignity.”
I’d much rather people speak good English than Hebrew with a bad American accent. I suspect Arabic speaker feel similarly.
Couple of questions on this topic that I’ve been wondering about, though this might not be the right forum for this:
Why the hell don’t Americans (I’m not sure how it is in other English-speaking countries) call places by the names that natives call them? Turin/Torino is one that was on my mind recently due to the Olympics. Is it so hard to say “Torino”? Why was the Olympic coverage calling it “Torino” when it was always called “Turin” in America before that?
What about country names like Italy/Italia, etc.? It has always struck me as odd that we stick to these Anglicized pronunciations. Is it a form of English-centric chauvanism? Or is there another reason for it of which I am unaware? Why isn’t it considered disrespectful to pronounce a name wrong when you know and are capable of pronouncing it correctly? Calling Saddam Hussein “SAD-dam” instead of “Sad-DAM” always seemed like a deliberate slam, just like “eye-RACK” or “eye-TAL-ian” does.
I have noticed that some people think it’s pretentious to pronounce foreign names with the correct accent. A friend of mine was visiting Central America recently and was using a Spanish accent when saying the place names, and another friend scolded him, saying he was an American, and he sounded like a jerk saying, “Pah-nah-mah” instead of “PAN-a-ma.” Why?
There was a trend of places changing and trying to enforce the pronunciations of their names in the native tongue-- Bombay/Mumbai, Ivory Coast/Cote d’Ivoire, Peking/Beijing. Is this trend going to continue? Why do some places get all hardcore about the native pronunciation?
If these questions are hijacks, lemme know and I’ll start another thread somewhere else.